Well I shot my secondary body panels today and they did not turn out too bad for an amateur......after all, that is what I be. I am trying to learn though and had 4 panels fish eye on me.....and I mean an ocean. I continued to finish them and you really can not notice unless you closely inspect at a certain angle. I am not upset about if for it is only a play toy but I would like to know what went wrong.....I did not have this problem when I shot the vette. I suppose the fish eyes are contamination? I only did 2 things different between this and the vette. On this I used a post sanding solution, HOK KC-20. In separate buckets I wiped it down with water first, then wiped it down with the KC-20, then again with water. On the vette I used Dawn to wash it down and not KC-20. I also did not paint the vette on the same day I washed it. Could the primer still have been wet even though it looked dry? Is the KC-20 junk? Needless to say I took the remaining 6 body panels and washed them down today with Dawn and am letting them sit in the sun to paint tomorrow. Take a look at the pics and tell me what went wrong.....

I'd give you the "Biggest Fisheyes of the Month" award.

Who knows how these things happen sometimes.

One of the lessons I've learnt is to prepsol well and wash everything before painting. Never leave anything outside where who knows what may fall on it. Once in the booth I prepsol again and then wipe down with either a plain water spray or an alcohol/water mix. Always make sure to use clean cloths. I haven't used that cleaner product but sometimes proprietary cleaners can cause more problems than they solve.

Well I am going to try and shoot the main body panels tomorrow and it would really suck if this happened on them. All I can do is try........oh, yeah, thanks for the award.....I do like to fish.

Well for an amateur I am not unhappy with this. You can not even see the fish eyes unless you get down 8 inches from the panel and if you do that you just need to step away from the vehicle. Now that is not to say I want the main body panels to do that but if they turn out this good I will be on the strip. I decided to wait and not rush the main panels.

When using a Wax and Grease remover you must wipe it off immediately before it flashes off. The contaminants are suspended in the W&G and removed when the clean towel removes the solution.
Once clean it must flash off completely. At that point is should be ready to paint, no need to wash with water again.

Another thing that can cause fish eyes with epoxy primer and some paints is putting the first coat on too heavy.

Jay D.

Well I figured out it was that HOK cleaner that interacted with the paint.....I cleaned the other panels with Dawn and water and had no fisheye problem. The stripe did not turn out too bad for a first time. I attempted to spray that black paint with my detail gun and a 1.0 tip....well that was not happening due to it being so thick. I reduced it some and shot it threw a 1.3 and it seemed to lay down pretty well.